Making a mojomancer

As the title says. Although a mojomancer is technically a necro that uses a merc + only curse tree to kill, ill be playing on classic d2 where there are no mercs (worth using in nm and hell) so ill have a clay//iron golem as a tank.

What i am wondering, is what my skill tree should be!

This will be, for the most part, untwinked, so i cant rely on more than... ~5 at most + skills.

If you plan on playing in patch 1.10 or later then I'd advice you to do a search for "mojomancer" or "cursemancer". There have been a few threads on this subject and the general outcome was that you'd not be very successful as a Mojomancer.

If you still want to play a Mojomancer then you need IM, Attract, DV maybe Decrep and some BA wouldn't hurt.

With respect I've found that as often as not the majority opinion online isn't worth squat.

Attract and Iron Maiden are just made to go together... very nice combo.

You will want to put more than one point into Attract because at higher difficulties its duration is halved then halved again.

On my hardcore Iron Maiden specialist I've got (for some reason which escapes me, possibly had something to do with Marrowwalks?) I've got the prerequisites for Bone Prison, but no points in BP. BW however I find is useful for 'scouting'. The only serious problem with Attract and Iron Maiden is they both have radiuses which do not increase with extra points, so you may find yourself casting them a lot more than you would if the monsters were otherwise clumped.

Confusion is a great way of clumping monsters. I was using Confusion + Poison Explosion as a theme for a character. Initially it was great, but you can get overwhelmed if too many groups of monsters get sucked in or there are a lot of archers or flayers (confusion has the reverse effect on flayers, it tends to spread them out, which can be quite dangerous).

Decrepify + Clay Golem is a great way of killing bosses. However in your case it might be inadequate, since you can't rely on your merc to slowly whittle away at the boss. NB: in 1.11 your mercs should be a lot better in classic than they used to be, since you can hire them close to your level, which is a big improvement! (Even though they still disappear when you change acts of course)

I guess the main leveling up area in classic would be the chaos sanctuary. Confusion will be overridden by the undead knights, so be careful, you can create a huge crowd which suddenly turns against you.

Also, Iron Maiden doesn't do much to them, since they are mostly casters, so you have to come up with some kind of backup plan.

Iron Golem does okay up to a certain point, but I usually find that a boss fight will mean he dies early on and I switch to Clay Golem. You won't have fetishes or charms, so keep in mind that skills which don't require +skills to do more damage are the way to go.

One way of thinking about the Iron Golem is that he has +6 to Iron Maiden.
I often find myself casting extra crowd control to keep them from ganging up on him too much.

For extra difficulty I guess you could cast Clay Golem from a wand so as to not spend skill points in the summons tree and thus be a 'true' mojomancer.

Personally I think a more useful definition of a mojomancer would be if they spend 50% or more of their skill points in the curse tree.

If you are playing online, Iron Maiden and/or Dim Vision might be good as regular curse casts. Dim Vision especially to shut down enemy spell casters. You can then rely on the other team members to take down bosses, where even a single point in amplify damage will more than pull your weight, or if the other team members are a bit skanky then gumby + decrepify will shore up the defense quite nicely!

If the other members of the team are especially poorly skilled or equipped then if they die in a tough fight they may just log out. Now even a badly equipped barb or pally is still something useful to have around, so if you notice that the other team members are taking a beating during normal fights, switch quickly to Lifetap if you think a fight will be tougher than normal.

In a group situation I wouldn't use Confusion, since the other players won't understand its monster pulling power (and may get overwhelmed and killed) also they may find it puts too much strain on their computer and is also too... well... confusing as their screen gets overwhelmed with sprites.

For non classic:
One of the groups of monsters which Iron Maiden really does a number on is Lister's minions. Whereas the wave of council members for instance is best taken care of by confusion or (multiple castings of) attract. Note that with Confusion if you kill the boss (umm... Bremm Sparkfist??) Baal will summon the next wave if the remaining council members are confused, which means you'll be battling hydras *and* balrogs at the same time (hope your Fire Resists are good )